I am running out of my hard drive space fast and I want to get a reliable external hard drive.

I will be backing up all of my pictures to the external hard drive, so reliability is a must. I'm looking for 1 TB or 1.5 TB in size.

I've been looking at some drives offered by Costco as they are quite cheap there. Namely Seagate 1.5TB and Western Digital's My Book home edition.

I was about to make the purchase until I saw some of the reviews.

I've read numbers reports reports these drives crashing only after a few months of use, and cannot retrieve any of the files. They are gone, and the manufactures are not helping, and must shell out $1500+ just to recover the lost files.

I want a reliable storage option that is permanent and have easy access.
This is for PC if that makes any difference.

I've also heard those horror stories but I have personally had no issues with my (two) WD MyBook Studios. They have E-SATA, FW800, USB and FW400 via backward compatibility with 800. Speeds aren't fantastic but they
were relatively inexpensive.

Are you looking for a backup device (a copy of what is on your main drive) or an archive device (something that will store all of your images so they can be removed from your main drive)?

If it is a backup device then if it fails you have only lost your second (backup) copy of things and you can make another backup.

If it is an archive device or main image store I would be looking for two external drives, a master and a backup. For any computer file I would always recommend a minimum of two copies in physically separate locations i.e. not two partitions of the same hard drive.

No storage medium is 100% reliable, temperature changes, power spikes and all sorts of issues can be a reason for failure, which is why the rule of two copies mentioned above is a good one to follow.

If you want reliability, get a drive with the lowest capacity in the largest enclosement. Sure, that 500 GB laptop drive sounds good, but with data densities so high errors are very prone to occur.

If you want absolute reliability, get a regular sized drive of, say, 160 GBs. that should lower the chance of crashing.

Also, don't move/tap the harddrive when it's spinning, and keep it suffiently cool. try not to plug/unplug it too often (heating&cooling down), and always eject it using your operating system when you unplug it.

_________________I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".

I have a 500GB Maxtor and a 1.5 TB Maxtor. The 500GB is a backup drive and the 1.5TB is just for junk. The 500GB is on 24/7 and works great. It backs up all my photos, mp3s and documents every day with no intervention from me. I run a desktop as a server and everyone in the family has their own laptop. With my laptop I can always access the 500GB, but the 1.5TB is a little flaky and has to be restarted periodically. I think the smaller drives would be your best bet. I am a network administrator for the US Government and have used Lacie drives at work. They are crap. If you don't shut them down properly they sometimes lose the File Allocation Table and you have to reformat to use the device. This wipes everything on the disk. If you have a power outage you are up the creek. So if you use a Lacie, be sure to use an UPS.

Erm... if the external HD is a backup, that means you still have another copy of the data elsewhere. Two copies is all you need unless you're seriously unlucky or paranoid. A raided NAS is more appropriate for increased uptime, but you'd still need a separate copy elsewhere to be safe e.g. to protect against accidental deletion.

we have been using western digital drives for backing up our data for about 10 years now, we had 2 seagate drives and a maxtor drive over the years which all failed so we only buy western digital drives now. we keep 2 copies of our data onsite and one backup which goes to the cloud using Crashplan which offer backup seeding. remember they say your data does not exist unless you have it in 3 places.